“Wrop him up and get him into your sleigh, father, and take him home; then come right back.  Bed’s the place for him.  Keep that hot flat-iron on his stomach, if he’d rather have it than the mustard.  Men-folks are such cowards.  I’ll dress Dick while you’re gone.  Mebbe it’s a Providence!”

On the whole, Dick agreed with Mrs. Todd as he stood ready to make his entrance.  The School Committee was in the church and he had had much to do with its members in former days.  The Select-men of the village were present, and he had made their acquaintance once, in an executive session.  The deacons were all there and the pillars of the church and the choir and the organist—­a spinster who had actively disapproved when he had put beans in the melodeon one Sunday.  Yes, it was best to meet them in a body on a festive occasion like this, when the rigors of the village point of view were relaxed.  It would relieve him of several dozen private visits of apology, and altogether he felt that his courage would have wavered had he not been disguised as another person altogether:  a popular favorite; a fat jolly, rollicking dispenser of bounties to the general public.  When he finally discarded his costume, would it not be easier, too, to meet his father first before the church full of people and have the solemn hour with him alone, later at night?  Yes, as Mrs. Todd said, “Mebbe ’twas a Providence!”

* * * * *

There was never such a merry Christmas festival in the Orthodox church of Beulah; everybody was of one mind as to that.  There was a momentary fear that John Trimble, a pillar of prohibition, might have imbibed hard cider; so gay, so nimble, so mirth-provoking was Santa Claus.  When was John Trimble ever known to unbend sufficiently to romp up the side aisle jingling his sleigh bells, and leap over a front pew stuffed with presents, to gain the vantage-ground he needed for the distribution of his pack?  The wing pews on one side of the pulpit had been floored over and the Christmas Tree stood there, triumphant in beauty, while the gifts strewed the green-covered platform at its feet.

How gay, how audacious, how witty was Santa Claus!  How the village had always misjudged John Trimble, and how completely had John Trimble hitherto obscured his light under a bushel.  In his own proper person children avoided him, but they crowded about this Santa Claus, encircling his legs, gurgling with joy when they were lifted to his shoulder, their laughter ringing through the church at his droll antics.  A sense of mystery grew when he opened a pack on the pulpit stairs, a pack unfamiliar in its outward aspect to the Committee on Entertainment.  Every girl had a little doll dressed in fashionable attire, and every boy a brilliantly colored, splendidly noisy, tin trumpet; but hanging to every toy by a red ribbon was Mrs. Larrabee’s Christmas card; her despised one about the “folks back home.”

[Illustration:  HANDS THAT TREMBLED, AS EVERYBODY COULD SEE]